


Swift as a Falcon, Soft as a Dove

by alephthirteen



Series: Of Queens and Maids, Kings and Stable Boys [1]
Category: Disney - All Media Types, Disney Princesses, Maleficent (Disney Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Intrigue, Magic, Multi, Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 04:51:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21093695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: SPOILER ALERT:  WrittenAFTERwatching "Maleficient: Mistress of Evil" (2019) so if you haven't seen it, the backstory to this would give it away...  Since the movie has only been out two days, I'm not posting a full summary here.   It is set starting one day after the events depicted.A "fairy tale for grownups" version of Disney's Maleficent.  The first part of a larger collection of stories based on Disney fairytale movies but taking them in a more realistic direction.  The prince or princess gets the girl but magic has a cost and curses are broken with ancient and painful magic, not a mere kiss.  Uses a more traditional view of the fae, where they are seductive, tricky and at times, ferocious. Expands on the worldbuilding attempted by the movie by adding more fae, light and dark and in between, and gives a more realistic, yet hopeful, tale of how Fae and Men came to be at peace.  Happily Ever Eventually (tm)...in this case by way of healing, personal friendships and diplomacy, rather than handwaving away a war because the movie is only two hours long...





	Swift as a Falcon, Soft as a Dove

**Author's Note:**

> Some terms. Birding and falcronry and historical terms are based on old English literature.
> 
> Fae terms:  
Eyrie = nest of a falcon  
Falcon = female falcon  
Tercel = male falcon  
Farmfolk = fae term for humans (fae hunt or graze. they do not reap nor sow)  


"Must I?" Jeyne whimpers.  
  
"Hush, girl," her mother snaps. "To be called to the castle to serve is an honor."  
  
_A chance for you to make money, you mean._  
  
"To scrub floors," Jeyne groans.  
  
Her mother cuffs her head, lightly. To scold, not to punish.  
  
"To serve wine to the guests."  
  
"The guests?"  
  
"Aye. When someone comes into your home, they’re a guest, girl."  
  
"I know what a guest is, mother. And I know guest right and guest’s blessings and even guest’s curse."  
  
_Guest’s curse. The priests say the gods will curse anyone who takes an enemy and makes no amends. It’s what Wharton forgot._  
  
"Hmph. Pity that I taught you to read," she grumbles. "It’ll be a cold winter."  
  
"I’ll give you most of them in the morning," Jeyne promises. "I have three left to read."  
  
"The bawdy ones, no doubt."  
  
"The very same," Jeyne replies.  
  
"Look at yourself," her mother commands.  
  
The dress is the best her family has. Black cotton, trimmed with red lace borrowed from the carcass of a wedding dress three grandmothers past.  
  
Fitting, Jeyne supposes, for a not-woman to wear a not-dress.  
  
The baker’s boy who lives upstairs thinks she’s a woman. Every other time she sees him, his prick turns hard and his cheeks go the color of a drunkard’s.  
  
Jeyne saw a woman yesterday. Someone truly worthy of the term.  
  
It was a halfwit’s mistake, wandering up against the castle walls when the streets were so strangely empty. Usually, she could fill a basket with still-fresh fruit or cooked meat in the baskets left for the beggars if she wakes early enough. Not clean, but if she washes it, safe to eat.  
  
Today that put her in the middle of a war. Winged men and women swooped through the town, snatching the king’s men and dashing them into carts and the spikes of fenceposts. They cut down any man or woman who carried or brandished iron. After they spotted the buckles, one man shed his boots and trousers to save his own life. They left. Taking no gold, raping no women, burning no homes. Murdering no children for sport. An army to be sure, but one nothing like the old books she read, the books about wars between the grand kings of ages past.  
  
Their restraint seemed queer to her, so Jeyne scaled a ruined section of the wall to watch.  
  
It was then she saw _women_, for the first time in her life. Rather, she saw the magic behind the word ‘woman’. The way that men whisper it in the tavern while she sweeps is prayer.  
  
They may not know it, but their words are worship.  
  
_Women will break you, boy, quicker than the whip can._  
  
_Once you’ve had a woman, you’ll understand._  
  
_A woman? Gods only know what they think._  
  
A woman is a creature kicked and struck and used like a dog but a woman is also a creature that exists beyond men. Past the edge of their understanding. Who does what no craftsman can ever do in giving life. One smile can soothe and enrage, heal and hurt all at the same time. One glimpse of the skin can turn a group of friends drinking together into a pile of corpses.  
  
That’s what the butcher boy sees in Jeyne.  
  
This morn, Jeyne saw that magic herself. Saw it in two different women. One was the Princess of the Moors: pink-skinned and plump of cheeks and of breasts, her neck and face dusted with freckles. She walked in a torn nightdress as if it were not unusual to be unarmed, unarmored and a woman in the middle of a battlefield.  
  
The fae queen. 

_Gods be kind!_

Jeyne was in the thrall of the fae queen from the moment she alighted in the courtyard in a whirlwind of green flame.  
  
Whatever a woman should be, lovely and graceful, brave and patient, this one – Maleficent, or so the knights had screamed as they fled her -- was that and that again a hundred times. If all the steel of all the swords of the knights of Ulstead and of Wharton had been melted by blacksmiths and forged into one single instrument, it would not be so terrifying.  
  
If all the queens and maids and mothers and whores of both kingdoms had poured all their tears and perfume together it would not be so sweet and so tempting and sad as the eyes that Jeyne saw. No jeweler who ever lived could hew a diamond so sharp as the way the bones of her face cut her silhouette against the still-rising sun.  
  
Each beat of her great wings brought up a storm. The wind threw men back and sent warhorses galloping away like mice. Bombs burst around her, scattering red poison that killed only the fae. Crossbows flung iron darts and iron pellets rained from the parapets.  
  
Maleficent stood her ground.  
  
The queen herself leveled a crossbow at her and fired, sending an iron dart into the fae queen’s shoulder, where the wound gleamed hot like a forge.  
  
An animal roar left the fae's scarlet lips one moment and the next, magic flowed from her hands. Magic! Rose wines became monsters, pulling men apart like the Kraken the sailors tell tales of. Oak trees uprooted themselves and walked, swinging their branches like hammers. Blades of grass stood tall and hard as spikes under her spell as the fliers threw their victims onto them. She moved her fingers like a puppeteer and all green things obeyed.  
  
The hair stood up all over Jeyne’s body, and the world slipped away. She saw a thousand days at once. Two of them, in particular, caught her attention.  
  
In one, the fae mercilessly slain by the royal soldiers. A hundred different kinds of creatures united as one race. Wiped from the earth. The queen denying infant pixies and weeping sprites mercy as they pleaded for their lives or even for quick deaths.  
  
In another, Ulstead was destroyed. Her soldiers were slashed with claws and bludgeoned with wooden mauls. In the center of it, Maleficent cradling a girl with a broken neck, shrieking in her rage. Waves of green flame spreading from her until nothing remained but ash. Winged conquerors taking flight to spread their wrath.  
  
She saw a thousand other things in between.  
  
In that dream, Jeyne saw a grand tale.  
  
Maleficent landed on the battlefield brimming with power. She could not fall, not so long as she held the rage of a hundred generations of murdered and humiliated fae in her breast. A lesson the queen learned when one of her bombs burned her to ash. She laughed like a madwoman, only to be slashed by the claws of a great black bird that rose in a cloud of flames. A phoenix! Elder Gods walked the earth when last a phoenix lived and yet one rose from Maleficent’s ashes. When the great bird curled its wings around the dying princess and all the Moors gathered to pray over her, it was Maleficent who rose from the nest, clad in a gown made from feathers of the beast held together with countless ravens-skull clasps.  
  
The battle was never just Ulstead and the Moors, two kingdoms battling to survive. It was never fae and men, battling for supremacy. There was no question. Every fae that fought moved like snakes and struck like storms and dodged like the wind. If men had carried the day, it would only be treachery and raw numbers.  
  
It was Maleficent battling for her daughter’s heart and the prince battling with himself to show enough courage and kindness to earn the fae queens’ mercy and the princess’s hand.  
  
When her mother woke her, Jeyne’s head ached. She had fallen backwards onto the bricks. Lucky to be alive, the gaurdsmen who brought her back said. The whispers in the tavern at supper made Jeyne’s blood go cold. The soldiers described the grand battle she saw in the dream. Exactly as she saw it.  
  
Her mother cuffs her again.  
  
"Oy! Easy. You’ll bruise me before the princes get a good look."  
  
"Get your head out of the clouds. You’ll be late, so go."  
  
Jeyne is shoved out the door and into the street. Two guardsmen are waiting there, having gathered a pack of women. All of them dressed black trimmed with red, like she is. Some of them are truly women, some just little girls who have bled once or twice.  
  
Towering over the guardsmen is a giantess made of wood and moss, carrying a spear tall as the innhouse. Her eyes are nothing but polished redwood but Jeyne still knows the look she gives is meant to be kind. How she knows it, she is not sure. When one of the soldiers leans too close to a girl, she brings the tip down on his foot and pulls him back.  
  
"Do you need anything else?" the guardsman nearest her asks.  
  
He shoots a look at his companion.  
  
Jeyne puts her arms behind herself and curtseys. When she does, she feels the steel hilt of her great-great-great-grandmother’s knife, tucked into the top of her smallclothes. The metal is cold as a frozen river. She warmed the knife by the fire for hours just so that it wouldn’t stick to her and pull of her skin. It never truly warmed so she wadded wool up and stuffed it between herself and the blade.  
  
"No ser," she replies. "Lead on."  
  
As they make their way past the Royal Chapel, Jeyne realizes how nearly the mad queen came to destroying them all. How can you win a battle against creatures who can crack stone with a whispered word and the roots in the soil? How mad must you be to raise a hand in anger to a fae witch who can fall from a tower and when she strikes the ground, it is the stone that cracks?  
  
Outside the feast hall, a white goat is tethered, guarded by four of the Honor Guard. It bleats at her in a way a goat never has before. As if its pride was wounded.  
  
Strange.  
  
Not two steps into the kitchens, Jeyne is grabbed by the wrist by a matron with an apron covered in dark smears. Cooks the sweets, Jeyne supposes, given how a dozen fruits stain her hands and how their scent blends into a perfume around her.  
  
"Stand up straight, girl! Turn three times."  
  
Jeyne complies.  
  
"This will do?" the matron asks someone by the stove.  
  
Too dizzy to make anything out, Jeyne says nothing.  
  
"She will do."  
  
"I will take her from here," growls a woman’s voice.  
  
Jeyne turns to look. A woman with copper skin and a painted face stands from the fire’s edge, tossing the last of a hambone into the flame. No, not a woman. A fae. Not the glittering pixies or the giggling sprites. A falconwoman like in her oldest books, the ones where the leather is cracked and crumbling. Books of epic poetry and hero’s lives.  
  
She has wings with feathers that must be a hundred different colors and curling horns on her head and tiny down feathers that cling to her bare arms and the sinews in her neck. One of the strange ones that came from the ocean, from the south. Sailors always come from the north because there is nothing to the south. Not so much as an island, far as the map-makers know.  
  
Yet here stands a woman whose wings span half the room folded and who is twice as broad and tall as the matron, perhaps more. She has four horns atop her head, curled in on themselves and close to the head. Like a ram’s horns. Her braided and beaded hair is looped around her horns.  
  
Unlike Maleficent, this one has feathers bright as the jungle parrots in the menagerie and from her horns and her wing-joints, splashes of red, yellow, green and pale blue sit on her skin like daubed paint. The shape of her hips and the length of her frame makes her seem soft—maidenlike--even though when she moves, it’s clear the muscles in her arms are more like the blacksmith.  
  
"Come along, farmfolk. The queen needs her wine and the last cupbearer fell ill."  
  
The matron shoves a pot of wine into Jeyne’s hands and pushes her towards the fae, muttering a few choice curses about ‘beasts’ and ‘harlots’. The fae does not reply though Jeyne saw her pointed ears twitch. She heard the insult, no question.  
  
"Queen?" Jeyne asks.  
  
"Aye, farmfolk. The only queen there is."  
  
"Queen Aurora?" Jeyne asks. "From the moors?"  
  
The fae laughs.  
  
"Too busy staring at her future husband to breathe, let alone drink. Not sure if she’s still our queen. Depends who rides whom in the marriage bed, I suspect."  
  
"Oh."  
  
So it’s Irinthe she’s here to serve. The mad queen cackling at the top of a broken tower while Aurora nearly fell to her death.  
  
Jeyne has never liked the queen. Something in her eyes was never quite right. This morning, the queen’s hate nearly destroyed the entire kingdom, if not the race of men. So Jeyne was right to hate her and she likes to think that makes her wise.  
  
"So Maleficent did let Queen Irinthe live?"  
  
The fae chuckles.  
  
"After a fashion. Witches like her…" she sighs. "Let’s just say they have different ideas of mercy."  
  
"That’s good," Jeyne replies.  
  
It really isn’t. Queens who get thousands of men slain before mid-day deserve to die. Hanging would be best. Chopped off, her head might still look pretty but no one looks pretty strangled.  
  
As they weave through the hall, the eyes following Jeyne change. Men’s eyes at first. Blue and brown and once in a while, green eyes. Soldiers and merchants and rabble invited to drink and feast at royal expense. As if that sort of apology restored their dead families.  
  
Then they cross the middle of the hall and the aisle between the two long tables, and it changes. Now it’s only fae eyes. Women and men both, silver and gold and violet and crimson eyes. Eyes with slits, like a cat and eyes with a curve like a lizard and eyes with no pupil at all, merely black orbs like a dragonfly. Their stares linger longer than the men’s did and she hears murmurs and growls and whispers about her beauty.  
  
Under their gaze, her pulse quickens and she feels a knot of heat gather in her belly.  
  
The crowd thins towards the far end, as they get closer to the thrones. Six thrones each for both host and visitor.  
  
Jeyne’s feet stop working.  
  
Maleficent is right in front of her, rubbing her right shoulder against the stone back of the throne as if she were a cat rubbing against someone’s legs.  
  
"Your grace? A new cupbearer, as you’ve asked."  
  
"Thank you, Quetz."  
  
"Y-y-y-you…"  
  
"I," Maleficent purrs, her ruby-red lips revealing pointed teeth. "I am Maleficent, Queen of the Fae, Blood of the Undying, Born of Pheonix, Protector of the Moors. More importantly, I have an itch and a thirst, girl. Do something about it."  
  
The itch? Jeyne reels. How could I possibly…  
  
"The wine, girl?"  
  
Jeyne manages not to drop the wine but little else. She can’t move two paces forward. Feathers tickle the back of her knee as she’s pushed towards the fae queen.  
  
"What would I do without you, Quetz?" Maleficent laughs.  
  
"Not much, I suppose."  
  
Jeyne pours the wine. It’s spicewine, she realizes with a cough. When she stops halfway, the fae queen merely raises her eyebrow. So Jeyne pours until the wine reaches the brim.  
  
After a sip, the fae slouches back in the chair, crossing her bare feet.  
  
"Storms," Maleficent grumbles. "Do sit, before you forget how to stand like you’ve forgotten walking and talking."  
  
Jeyne does not sit so much as fall, splashing wine on her dress.  
  
"I smell iron on you. Are you here to kill me?"  
  
"No! I swear! A knife, so I can keep my virtue. Nothing more."  
  
"Virtue," Maleficent sniffs. "Strange idea."  
  
"What?"  
  
The queen turns to face Jeyne, looking her up and down.  
  
"Any man here would like a ride," she teases. "You farmfolk eat when you’re hungry and drink when you’re thirsty. If you’re getting fat, you stop eating. But fucking? You act like you’d rather swallow fire. Every man who looks at you has a hunger, a thirst, and rather than acting, he denies himself. Must be why you’re so miserable you spend all day making iron darts and poison powders."  
  
"It’s a wedding! Wine and song! Drums and dancing!"  
  
"Half of these falcons will have fledglings in their belly by the next moon," Maleficent sighs, waving her arms at the fae women writhing in front of a circle of drummers. "Children which will be raised as our own."  
  
"More than a few Ulstead maidens will have a tercel’s cock in them before the night is done."  
  
"Tercel?"  
  
Maleficent takes Jeyne’s hand and lifts her finger to point at a soldier.  
  
"Man."  
  
She presses Jeyne’s finger to her throat, stroking the vein.  
  
"Woman."  
  
She points to a falconman who has one of the Queen’s swordswomen in his arms, bent back like a reed in a river. They kiss and nip each other's mouths. Their hands roam and tug and pinch. Unlike Maleficent or her advisor, he is not a feathered giant. He is no taller than the woman in his arms.

"He would be a tercel," she explains.  
  
Maleficent puts a finger to her nose.  
  
"I am a falcon...and a lovely one, if I say so myself."  
  
"As for her," she waves her hand at the guard. "Expect she’ll be screaming before dawn. Imagine a spear with a crown of feathers to tickle you," Maleficent purrs.  
  
Jeyne shivers. Maleficent’s cheek brushes against Jeyne’s shoulder.  
  
"Those little ones will be changelings. Cleverer, quicker and stronger than any human lad or lass. Surely feathers are a small price to pay? Any yet…rather than see this as a point of pride, mother and child will be cast out and shamed. Like as not, she’ll lose her posting."  
  
"Why shouldn’t we? Why shouldn’t the living celebrate their victory ever way they can? I can see you’re not immune to the heat of the moment," Maleficent chuckles.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Look down, girl."  
  
Jeyne looks over and meets a pair of eyes green as emerald. She follows Maleficent’s gaze to her dress, the front of which is wet with wine and the fabric sticks to her skin. There is music and wine and folk dancing everywhere they can find a floor and all the while a strange woman’s eyes rake Jeyne’s skin and her long fingers trace patterns on her arm. Her nipples are hard as pebbles.  
  
"Can I see the knife, girl? Or were you planning on dipping it in me?"  
  
When Jeyne reaches for the knife, Quetz pulls a wooden sword from its scabbard on her thigh and levels the point over Jeyne’s throat. Maleficent huffs.  
  
"I have magic, Quetz."  
  
"Humans have iron knives, Mal. I’d rather not test your luck twice in one day. Move slow, girl. Shame to have to fetch a third cupbearer…"  
  
Jeyne balances the knife in her palm. To her surprise, Maleficent does not hesitate. She runs her fingertip along it even as her skin sizzles. As she does, the symbols etched along the flat of the blade catch fire, white flame licking Jeyne’s hand but not burning it. The cutting edge hisses and sputters, the steel undulating like a snakes’ coils.  
  
_It’s magic…this must be worth a fortune. Mother was using it to cut potatoes this morning! Not like her to leave an heirloom unsold._  
  
"Where did you steal this, girl?"  
  
"I-I-I didn’t."  
  
"Really?"  
  
"It’s been in my family for generations. Passed down. Mother to daughter."  
  
Quetz clicks her tongue and jerks her head towards the kitchens.  
  
"Wait here, girl. Apparently, I need to speak to my general. How dull!"  
  
"Not ‘girl’. I have a name," Jeyne complains.  
  
"Do you?"  
  
"Jeyne."  
  
Maleficent bows mockingly, turning her wings down too.  
  
"Wait here, Lady Jeyne."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor useless Jeyne, unaware of her plight!
> 
> "Goodness, Maleficient! What great wings you have!"  
"The better to tickle you with, my dear!"  
"And what sharp teeth!"  
"The better to mark your flesh."


End file.
